


a geneology of knives

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Absent Parents, Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-01-22
Packaged: 2018-03-04 07:29:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2989583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winchesters have never been hunters. Theirs is a line of godly, righteous men, Men of Letters, stretching all the way back to Adam. And everything is different, except for all the things that are the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a geneology of knives

John Winchester is a legacy. His father is the man with the shock-white hair and the key to Haven under his pressed shirt; not just a Man of Letters but the man who bound and defeated Abbadon, the Knight of Lucifer. And so John Winchester is the son of godly learned men, stretching all the way back to Adam.

Or so they say.

John Winchester is a legacy, and one day he will be a Man of Letters (a _hero_ ) like his father. By the time he is thirteen, he is fluent in Latin, Hebrew, Sumerian, Greek, and Sanskrit; can write them all out in a steady hand. At fifteen, he can channel the energy of his soul, has any number of spells at his fingertips, and knows the weaknesses and strengths of a hundred dark and twisted creatures. For John Winchester is the son of godly learned men, and John Winchester is tasked with protecting the earth from their wiles.

He exorcises his first demon on the night of the senior prom. It takes one look at him, wheezes, _Winchesssterrr,_ and then starts laughing a terrible, high laugh.He manages to croak out every word of the spell, even the _audi nos,_ before vomiting onto the blacktop.

He graduates second in his class, and spends exactly six breathless, glorious months at college where not one person knows he is Henry Winchester's son. He drinks weak beer and gets high; takes classes about modern history and philosophy and listens to records of Bob Dylan played during experimental films. He thinks, _this_.

It's almost spring when he receives the letter, embossed with the Aquarian star letterhead. He's gone the next morning.

They send him to Vietnam to confer with the Len dong mediums, a ghost-passenger on a ship full of drafted soldiers. They hate him, and John--whose name was quietly taken out of the lottery because one day he will be a Man of Letters, and serves a higher purpose--does not begrudge them their hatred. 

John says in the crumbling ruins of Po Nagar, communicating with pidgin Vietnamese and Chinese, taking notes with a blunt pencil. The temple doubles as an infirmary for the wounded villagers, and one muggy night he watches a boy with dark eyes die in front of him, skin burnt away with napalm. 

(It steals his breath, how much he wants to hunt down the man who did this, flay his skin from his bones and watch him writhe. John did not know he had a capacity for revenge. It feels as though he has grown wolves' teeth overnight.

But John Winchester will be a Man of Letters some day, and so he merely writes out in his fluid hand, _Are we certain man is better than the monsters?)_

He will meet Mary Campbell years later, while tracking a rogue vampire to observe its nesting habits. Mary Campbell is a hunter, a brute instrument with blue eyes and a streak of sarcasm a mile wide. They do not get along, because hunters and Men of Letters have never gotten along, and also she thinks he's an ass. But Mary Campbell is the Kansas girl with the corn-silk hair and blood on her hands, amulet slung around her neck and anti-possession tattoo inked in a place John won't get to until the third date. She wields a knife like it's an extension of herself, and her Latin pronunciation is godawful, and John is in love or in argument, he can't quite tell.

 _I hate this_ , she will tell him after a week of grudgingly working beside one another. Her eyes are gold in the firelight as the vampire's carcass burns.  _I want out of this life, out for good, out forever._ _I hate it, John. I hate everything we are._

 _I'm a legacy,_ he means to tell her, but it comes out as, _I know_ _._

She kisses him with blood still on her hands. They will elope a year later, leaving behind their families and everything they are meant to be. The wedding night is spent in the backseat of John's 1967 Chevy Impala, laughing and giddy, drunk on newfound freedom.

The day his son ( _Dean_ , so small, a fine peach fuzz of blonde on his bobble head) is born, John damn near dies with joy. He takes a hundred poloroids--mother and child, child sleeping, mother trying to roll her eyes back in her head at husband's idiocy. As an afterthought he writes _your grandson_ on the back of two, slips them into envelopes for the families that haven't spoken to them in five years. 

He regrets it the next day, but what's done is done.

Sometimes, when he is raking leaves in the yard, or tucking Dean in at night, he runs a tongue across his flat teeth and thinks of the dark-eyed boy in the jungle. Thinks of hellfire and napalm, and how he could not stand to lose this.

The feeling passes.

* * *

When Dean is four, he holds his baby brother ( _tight now, Dean, don't let him fall_ ) as his father is named a Man of Letters. All Dean will remember of the ceremony is the white white robes the men wore, and the way that the smell of smoke still clung to Sammy's wispy baby hair.

( _I left for your mother,_ Dad had explained, his eyes hard. _And now I'm returning for her. Do you understand, Dean? This is what we do for family._ )

Dean Winchester is a legacy. His father is the man with the healing burn scars and the fire-bright revenge; the hollow-eyed, hunted Man of Letters who is as good with a gun as with a grimoire, and spends more time tracking monsters in far-flung corners of the country than teaching his sons the Way. But Dean Winchester is the son of godly learned men, stretching all the way back to Adam.

Or so they say.

Dean Winchester is a legacy, and one day he will be a Man of Letters like his grandfather, the man with sunken eyes who shelters and feeds and teaches them as their father roams the country. But Dean Winchester is also a Campbell, the son Mary Campbell, and a hunter's blood runs hot in his veins. When he's seven, he draws an anti-possession tattoo on his chest with a permanent marker and it lasts a whole week before Grandfather finds it. He strips Dean down to his underwear, makes him wash it away with rubbing alcohol while reciting the names of Hours and their ruling angels. Sammy watches through a crack in the door, eyes wide, and for him Dean clenches his jaw, holds his head up high. _Tight now, Dean, don't let him fall._

(Sometimes ragged men in bluejeans and scars come to Grandfather's door, guns hidden at their hips and the smell of tobacco smoke in their clothes. They come for their marching orders, or to report a kill, but sometimes they catch sight of Dean peering through the stair railings and their hard mouths soften.  _Hey,_ _aren't you Mary and John's kid?_ they ask, before Grandfather shoves them out the door and makes Dean copy out Magic Circles until the tetragrammatic names are emblazoned on the backs of his eyes. Because Dean Winchester is the son of godly learned men, and nothing less.)

When he's thirteen, Dean speaks three languages and has skipped two grades; hates his grandfather and sleeps through calculus because he's been doing differentials since he first figured out how to optimize brewing times But there's a homemade sawed-off under his bed, and a spiral notebook full of lists on how to kill vampires, rugarus, shifters. He exorcises his first demon at thirteen, in the middle of an abandoned warehouse he's been prepping for weeks instead of going to band practice. The demon takes one look at him, the pentacle lines he's so carefully drawn and redrawn again, and laughs: _Winchester_.

 _Campbell_ , Dean snarls, because he's going to get this right, before he banishes this fucker to hell. _It's Campbell, you sulfur-sucking piece of shit._ _Exorcizamus te--_

(Sammy finds out, because Sammy always finds out. Especially when Dean comes staggering back, pale as death and the smell of rotting eggs in his hair. It's Sammy who draws Dean over to the sink, scrubs the paint out from under his nails. _You used a Solomonic pentacle, right?_ he asks quietly. _You drew the circle of protection in holy oil, infused with ground angelica root? You--_

He'll make a good Man of Letters someday, Dean thinks, and vomits into the sink, so that the water can sluice that away too.)

Dean is seventeen when he announces to the Council that he will not go to the college they want. In fact, he will not go to any college. For a minute he thinks his ass is going to be disowned--it's only Elder Jones, who offers to take him on as an apprentice, that keeps Grandfather from kicking him to the curb right then and there. _Idiot boy_ , Elder Jones grumbles as Dean follows him out of the room. _You think you're going to protect your family any better from the street?_ And Dean doesn't know what to say because Sam's waiting back at the house, all of thirteen, and Dean's his only real family because they haven't seen Dad in two fucking years, and what--he's going to go off to college and leave Sammy by himself with the books and the old men that guard them?

 _(don't let him fall_ _don't let him fall_ _don't let him fall_ _don't let him fall_ )

Dean likes Elder Jones, his sour whiskey-breath and the stump of a leg Vietnam left him with, the off-color jokes he cracks and the way he doesn't blink twice when Dean says he's summoned a demon before. He teaches Dean how to cast twenty-six lexicons of spells and channel the energy of his soul, to swear in Korean and conjugate in Russian. They practice their aim together, Dean with his sawed-off, Jones with a mouthful of tobacco and his old M1911 pistol. He always makes sure Dean gets home in time to make dinner for Sam, and sometimes he'll bring a little something his wife (Elder Reugel, a seer from the line of Gad) whipped up for them.

Dean once, traitorously, lets himself wonder if this is what it's like to have a father.

It's Jones who says,  _You'll be eighteen soon--gonna call up your daddy, get him to whisk you away for a life of guns and salt rings?_ It's Jones who listens when Dean tells him, haltingly, about little white houses and nursery fires and demons with yellow eyes.

And it's Jones who shows up the next day with a stack of dusty books, each and every one of them from the restricted Elders' Library. Dean opens the one on top at random, only to find pages and pages of cramped Latin detailing-- _The denizens of the pit?_ he translates with surprise.

Jones grunted. _Better get reading, Winchester.  
_

 _Campbell_ , Dean tells him as he reaches for the book on top of the stack. _It's_ _Campbell._

For the next two years, Dean eats, sleeps, and breathes demonology. It's him the hunters come to now, all stiff shoulders and gruffness and a resentment, around the edges--however much he knows about demons, Dean is young, and his hands are soft; he's not even a Man of Letters, just a legacy, just a son of godly learned men who these grim-visaged warriors never liked in the first place.

(He's the one who thinks "grim-visaged warriors" when the men standing in his grandfather's kitchen are patchwork soldiers, fraying clothes and gunpowder under their nails, alcohol on their breath; swearing a blue streak or just silent, mountainous and wearied. They wear the battlefield, the endless blood-soaked mundane grind of it, and Dean feels like a kid playing at war, just by standing near them.)

But Dean keeps the fridge stocked with beer, and he introduces himself as Mary and John's kid. _Campbell_ , he says. _Call me Campbell_. He gets to know some of the frequent callers--Bobby and Rufus, who bicker like an old married couple and treat him with an gruff, paternal affection that reminds Dean of Elder Jones; Bill Harvelle, who squints and says,  _I've got a daughter 'bout your age,_ before settling in to hear about Louisiana's sudden rash of demonic possessions; Jim Murphy, who's an honest-to-God pastor, and tells Dean he's sorry for his loss before realizing that Dean's never met his grandparents, didn't know he had any beyond the aging man who can barely get himself out of bed anymore.

 _Deanna and Samuel Campbell,_ Dean tells Sam that night. _We've got second cousins and--whatever you call the kids of your second cousins--we've got a_ family _, Sammy--_

 _Dean, I have a Calculus test and my first summoning tomorrow,_ Sam interrupts, head buried in a textbook. _Can we do this another time?_

 _Course, Sammy,_ Dean says, after a minute of stunned silence. _I got--that grimoire to finish, I should get on that. Or Grandfather probably wants his dinner, I should--_

( _don't let him fall_ )

Dean renews his efforts, tears through the Restricted Elders library, and then the Secret Archives, and then the sub-sub basement library that you have to use advanced magic to even unlock, and the books come wrapped in chains and protective wards. He finds nothing. No Yellow-Eyed demons, no nursery-fire cases, many murdered mothers but none consistent--

 _Then you go to the source,_ Elder Jones tells him late one night, when Dean's scream of frustration woke the more skittish books. _But son, I want you to be sure about this. Point of no return, right here. You get any deeper, there's no turning back. And a man who hunts monsters should take care, lest he become one._

Dean thinks of Sammy hunched over another textbook, yammering about his Hebrew lessons or the girl that smiled at him in the lunchroom; about Grandfather, growing frailer by the day, and Dad, who hasn't even bothered to call for the last five months. He thinks of all the hunters wearing the battlefield, and how something hungry and deep opens up in him when he watches them.

He tells Elder Jones, _Not sure we're better than the monsters to start with_ _._

Jones releases him from his apprenticeship with a clap on the shoulder and a quiet word. It's Elder Abandonado who teaches Dean how to interrogate a demon. _Everyone has their own style_ , she tells him, while the minor spirit writhes on the rack. She cocks her head, and after a moment, pulls the silver dagger from its side. It screams.

 _Some go at it hard and fast,_ she tells Dean, like she's discussing the weather. _Others prefer to draw it out, break them down little by little; others like mind games, good cop/bad cop...it's all about what you're most comfortable with, and what you think will elicit the most information without killing the human vessel. That's the only rule. You can't lose the subject._

She puts the still-bloody knife in his hand.

Dean learns how to make a surgeon's incisions and a butcher's cuts; to school his face into an impassive mask; to cast agonizing spells and gauge how much blood loss the poor bastard being possessed can take. Interrogation is too hands-on for most of the Society, they don't consider it part of the Way, but there have always been those who recognized the necessity of...first-hand research. Someone had to teach the Inquisitors, after all.

So Dean learns. When he closes his eyes, all he sees are viscera, young women with their eyes black and their ribs opened up, and his hands aren't so soft anymore. 

Most of the information he gets is useless--Hell is a gossipy bunch, backstabbing and trying to sneak projects past one another, lust and lies and violence--but sometimes he catches a whisper of _blood_ and  _fire_ , things being carefully not said, before the demon grits its teeth and refuses to go further. But Dean shades in the silences, pieces together half-sentences and finds himself staring down something much bigger than a single demon and a single nursery. Deals made not for souls but for entrance to sleepy little white-picketed houses, on a specific night, when a six-month-old child was sleeping upstairs...

(Dean watches Sam sometimes, trying to see--trying to guess--but Sam talks about his teachers at school and the new rune-casting spell he learned the other day and is nerdy and pissy and _himself_ , so Dean says nothing.

 _There's still blood under your nails,_ Grandfather grumbles when Dean brings him his medicine before bed.  _It's a disgrace...my son off chasing demons and my grandson's torturing them...We are a line_ _of godly learned men, stretching all the way back to Adam!_   _How deep in the mud will the two of you drag the Winchester name before I am allowed to rest?_

 _It's Campbell_ , Dean almost snarls back, and he's stunned by the violence of the impulse, the fleeting awareness of how easy it would be to tear out this old man's throat--he is young and righteous and there is already blood under his nails. But Dean doesn't move, doesn't speak. He's not playing at war, anymore. He can lose a battle.)

The final piece doesn't slot into place until he summons Gremory. She's a minor demon, hardly worth the time to draw the pentacle, but Dean just finished with a Marquis of Hell and he's wiped. He's barely focusing on the summons, too busy wondering what they've got in the house for dinner--

 _Well, well,_ the demon drawls, smirking.  _If it isn't the blood of the blood of the demon._

Dean forgets about dinner.

( _don't let him fall don't don't **don't**_ )

* * *


End file.
